In today's networked computing environments, it is often necessary or desirable to provide large-scale content delivery to nodes in a network. One mechanism used for large-scale content delivery is a content distribution system using network coding. In general, a content distribution system is a network of interconnected cooperative nodes using network coding to distribute any type of digital content from a source to one or more of the interconnected cooperative nodes. Typical content distribution systems first have to construct an efficient overlay topology and then schedule the transmittal of information across that topology such that all nodes share the distribution effort evenly.
Several factors may affect the efficiency of typical content distribution systems. First, the efficiency of a typical content distribution system may decrease as the number of nodes in the overlay topology increases. Second, the efficiency of a typical content distribution system may decrease as the network becomes more heterogeneous, particularly with respect to the bandwidth capabilities of each individual node. Third, the efficiency of a typically content distribution may decrease as processing overhead is added to implement incentive mechanisms designed to prevent or minimize ‘leeching’ nodes. Leeching nodes are nodes that do not cooperate on the network and are modified so as to act only as receivers on the network, thus increasing their download speed.